ABSTRACT
Over the last half-century or more, waves of scholarly thought have carried the implication that the world is ‘socially constructed’ by human beings. Movements associated with this way of looking at humanity’s relationship with the world include phenomenology, relativism, structuralism, deconstructionism, the ‘strong programme’ of the sociology of knowledge, constructivism and postmodernism. Particular beliefs here are that all of our concepts are ‘theory-laden’, that we live within forms of life that we cannot escape, that the large concepts through which we anchor ourselves to the world have dissolved, that we cannot get outside of our frames of thought, and that we are, inescapably, under the sway of ideologies, not least in relation to public services, including higher education. In our understandings of the world, so it has repeatedly been urged, we have only constructions of the world with which to contend, with little if anything to decide between them.
